Dr. Aditya Kailash Jain, United Kingdom

I am Dr. Aditya Kailash Jain. I am a lecturer in human resource management at the Nottinghill University Business School. My primary work in occupational safety and health is research. I translate research into practice by means of writing guidance for policy level and also for industry. My main area of focus is manageing work organisation and how that can be maximized to promote workers` health. So it comes down to the management of psycho-social issues at work. So things like workers`stress, harassment and bullying at work are the kind of issues that I look into. And how better work organization and management can be used to improve the working conditions and workers`health. Stress if you look at the data and it depends on where you look at the data has generally been increasing over the years. Partially because there has been also an increase in awareness of the issues. Workers are more aware of stress and there are more mechanisms to report stress. There is more service and there are more questions being asked. Yes, stress has been increased. If we take Europe as an example stress has been increasing but not drastically as it was in the past ten years or so. Because in the recent few years there have been a lot of initiatives been taken aimed at trying to reduce the impact. It is still increasing but the rate at which it is increasing has reduced to some extent. More work needs to be done. But if you look outside of Europe, in places where policies for manageing stress and even awareness of stress is quite low, the increase rate is very substantial but unfortunately the awareness is very low. There are other issues which are more traditional health and safety isssues which take more prevelance. People don´t talk about issues like stress. The World Congress is organised by varies stakeholders. The focus has not been much on the more contemporary issues in relation to occupational safety and health, mostly linked to health issues and mental health issues specifically. I would like to see more of that. I would like to see more link between safety and health. Not talking just about occupational health and just about occupational safety but the link. They are not separate. We need to look at occupational safety and health more holistically. The World Health Organization has launched a framework on healthy work places which talks about the physical work environment, the psycho-social work environment, health promotion and what is corporate social responsibility in a way. That kind of thinking is quite important. I would like to see more of that in the World Congress. We see very good examples of how companies are excelling in reducing injuries, reducing accidents, reducing fatalities. We also see good examples of how companies are saving costs in relation to cutting down sickness absence because they are taking care of workers, lowering occupational deseases but they are interlinked if you have a good safety record it is likely that you might have a good occupational health record as well. If you have poor safety that will have impact on workers´ health as well. Because you will have more perceived stress, more insecurity at work. That can affect their mental health. We need to see more of that. We need to see the link between these differen areas.